Service providers commonly offer transport services that enable packet communication between a plurality of geographically dispersed private networks associated with an enterprise. Such transport services enable the private networks to communicate with each other as if the private networks were part of a single local area network. One reason the enterprise may choose to employ a transport service is that the private networks may be far enough apart that it would be prohibitive for the enterprise to build its own network infrastructure connecting the private networks.
Although transport services are beneficial to an enterprise, conventional transport services introduce complexity that may complicate network troubleshooting since conventional transport services do not notify an enterprise subscribing to a transport service when the transport service is non-operational.
For example, an enterprise network technician may know there is a connectivity problem between two enterprise locations, but may not know that a transport service on which his enterprise relies to connect the two locations is non-operational. Consequently, he may unnecessarily troubleshoot the private enterprise networks at each location that are connected by the transport service, assuming that the problem is in the private enterprise networks and not in the transport service.
Unbeknownst to the network technician, such troubleshooting is futile if the problem lies in the transport service. Furthermore, since the enterprise network technician generally does not have access to the devices providing the transport service, he is unable to restore the transport service even if he knows that the problem is in the transport service. Thus, the network technician is dependent on a service provider providing the transport service to resolve the connectivity problem.
If the service provider is able to inform the network technician that the transport service is not operational, troubleshooting may be greatly simplified. In such a scenario, the network technician could wait until the service provider restores the transport service before performing any network troubleshooting. In most scenarios, once the transport service is restored, the connectivity problem is resolved without troubleshooting or intervention by the network technician.